Subject: SMH: East Timor's tower of Babel:
Cultural clash over Timor's official language

Sydney Morning Herald August 16, 2002

East Timor's tower of Babel

A cultural clash over East Timor's official language is opening up a
new social divide. Dennis Schulz and Fernando de Freitas report.

Opposite the clerk in the Government's Office of Foreign Affairs, Maria
Gutierrez stares blankly at the official application, mouth agape. It is
written in Portuguese. Like most young East Timorese, she is a speaker of
Bahasa Indonesia. "What is this?" she asks in her native tongue.

The smartly dressed clerk behind the counter starts explaining in
Portuguese that she must fill out the application in that language before
it can be accepted by the Government. Portuguese is, after all, the
official language of East Timor. All documentation as well as all language
used in government offices must be written in Portuguese, he says.

Gutierrez can't understand a word he says but the clerk's body language
delivers the message. Defeated and angry, she turns with the application
in her hand, through the door and into the streets of Dili to look for a
translator.

She is not alone. Across the fledgling nation, the new Government's
decision to deem Portuguese the country's official language has prompted
what is shaping up to be the country's first social conflict.

Resentment is particularly rife among the country's younger generation
who grew up during the 23 years of Indonesian occupation. Most speak only
Indonesian and Tetum, the undeveloped local language.

"They are forcing people to speak Portuguese," charges
Indonesian-educated journalist Cristina Freitas. "Portuguese should
not be compulsory. And it should not be the official language because most
people don't speak it and don't want to speak it."

She cites recurrent problems in the East Timor Parliament. During a
recent debate, official documents were presented to the elected members
regarding the oil and gas agreement with Australia, with many unable to
read them. Translators were not available due to budgetary restraints, so,
amid the chaos, legislators were unable to finalise the issue. "How
can they consider or debate issues when they don't understand what's being
presented?" asks Freitas.

The language conflict is perhaps most apparent in the country's
schools. The Government has moved to make Portuguese compulsory at the
primary school level even though very few teachers have the necessary
command of the language to teach it. From year 4 to university, Indonesian
and Tetum are still allowed, but lower primary school teachers are
frustrated. Like their students, their knowledge of Portuguese is confined
to simple greetings and basic reading skills.

According to an official household survey conducted last year by the
Planning Commission, Portuguese is spoken by just 5 per cent of the
750,000 East Timorese, with Tetum spoken by 82 per cent and Indonesian by
43 per cent. Though Tetum is widely spoken, it is a language devoid of
technological diversity and it only recently achieved a standardised
grammar and spelling. Amid the controversy it was also made an official
language but is yet to feature in documentation.

Portuguese may be the language of the tiny minority but it will remain
the official language, according to the President, Xanana Gusmao.
"For now we will continue this initial maintenance of the Portuguese
language," he told the Herald. "Overall there are various
difficulties. Structural problems mainly - not just in Parliament with a
lack of translators to ensure all documents are translated, but to the
public sphere where people are having problems adjusting. It's difficult,
but does that imply we should have adopted Bahasa Indonesia instead?"

Gusmao was one of the National Council of Timorese Resistance (CNRT)
group of leaders who decided to make Portuguese the official language in
1999. It was a decision handed down by the leadership, most of whom had
not experienced the previous 23 years of occupation along with the general
East Timorese population. Many leaders had been either in the jungle
fighting a guerilla war or in exile overseas. Upon their return, they
found East Timor a nation of Indonesian speakers.

"This decision is coming from a very small group of leaders who
are, unfortunately, very powerful ones," says a constitutional lawyer
and former Fretilin member of parliament, Aderito De Jesus Soares.
"They have a romanticised view of Portuguese. It's a stupid strategy
that will backfire on us in the future."

For the Fretilin leadership, Portuguese is not simply a language - it
is a symbol of the steely resolve that took them to independence from
Indonesia. It was their Portuguese heritage - 450 years of colonisation
from afar - that created this hybrid Catholic state anchored in a sea of
Islam. Through the colonial period, President Soeharto and Jakarta's
generals failed to understand why the East Timorese were so steadfast in
their desire for independence when their neighbours in West Timor and
Christian Flores never rebelled.

"Without the Portuguese connection there would have been no
aspirations to nationhood in East Timor," explains linguist Dr
Geoffrey Hull of the University of Western Sydney. "It was the
Portuguese imprint that made the East Timorese a unique people, distinct
from those around them."

The leadership sees their decision as a practical one. The elevation of
Portuguese, they say, will align them strongly with a host of former
colonies that continue to speak the mother tongue, the sixth-most-spoken
language in the world. East Timor's leaders, and their ally the Catholic
Church, are determined not to see their country transformed into a
cultural satellite of Australia. "They are all aware that English is
a notorious killer," says Dr Hull. "That Anglophone culture in
Australia killed off scores of Aboriginal languages in less than 200
years, whereas in the four centuries of Lusophone hegemony, not one
dialect of East Timor has been lost."

It was no surprise that the Portuguese language was the first pillar of
East Timorese culture that was attacked by the Indonesians following the
1975 conquest. The country was sealed off for three years while the
Indonesians set about imposing their language and culture upon the
vanquished. It was a rigid regime that had worked well in the colonisation
process elsewhere in the archipelago. Speaking anything but Indonesian was
banned and physically punished. Among the mature, whispered Portuguese
remained the language of resistance while young East Timorese were
schooled in Indonesian by an army of imported Indonesian teachers.

As a result, today Indonesian is the language of the street, the
village and the marketplace. It is the most commonly spoken language in
the country, even though it is recognised by the Government as only a
"working language", as is English. It is a colonial vestige that
they are determined to dump. "We plan on phasing out Bahasa
altogether, but it will take time," explains East Timor's Minister
for Education, Culture, Youth and Sports, Armindo Maia. He believes that,
although the decision to make Portuguese the national language was made by
a select few, there was adequate consultation. "We consulted with the
people. We wrote a constitution and now we are implementing the
constitution. We are not imposing. We went through a process," he
says.

Maia was a member of the East Timorese ministerial delegation that
visited Jakarta earlier this month seeking to normalise relations with its
former colonial masters. With Indonesian its only positive legacy, the
Indonesian hierarchy was keen to see the language retained in East Timor's
classrooms. "A request was made by President Megawati to have
Indonesian included in the curriculum, but we did not respond to that
request," he says. "It will be discussed."

Meanwhile, in Dili, opposition to the imposition of Portuguese is
gaining momentum, a gulf of confidence widening between the generations.
Many younger East Timorese would prefer expanding Tetum to full
development than speaking Portuguese. Although it is recognised in the
constitution, the Government has done nothing to broaden Tetum's capacity
to satisfy the demands placed on a contemporary language in a changing
world. "The constitution clearly states that we should be developing
Tetum as the official language, but it's not happening," contends
Jose Lobato, a Fretilin member of the General Assembly. "Lack of
resources is a definite problem but I think there is also a lack of
political will. Young people are being marginalised."

Lobato is the son of a legendary Fretilin leader, Nicolao Lobato, who
was killed in 1978 during the guerilla war against the Indonesians. He
says the reason he ran for parliament was to fight against the
marginalisation of young East Timorese Indonesian speakers after
Portuguese was enshrined in the constitution as the sole national
language. It was through his efforts that Tetum was added to that
document.

Most believe the Portuguese language will not survive in East Timor.
The Government may attempt to phase out Bahasa Indonesia, but as a younger
leadership takes over from old freedom fighters, the language of their
former oppressors could return to prominence.

"You can't expect the majority of the population, which is
educated in Indonesian, to keep Portuguese once they have power,"
says Soares. "The Government needs to be flexible and leave the door
open on the language question. If they try to close the door, it will
create big tension in the near future."

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